SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)
By:
October 24, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… ska records! PLAYLIST HERE. Series edited by Josh Glenn.
Streets emptied, support systems cut, buildings decaying, and life shutting down; we’ve seen this movie before, they keep trying to replay it, and that’s the essence of a haunting. Before Reagan got fully ramped up, taking money away from social services and putting people out of their homes and college beyond reach, we Yanks watched this as a movie first, the eerie video for the Specials’ “Ghost Town”.
Thatcher had been at it for a couple years already, and we see the band driving around crumbling urban zones and singing about clubs shuttering, jobs disappearing, the future foreclosed for youth, and people afraid to go out at night for the violence that’s brewing amongst them. The night is left to the Specials, rolling through the deserted landscape like a hearse with no one left to pick up, or sometimes careening like the characters in a midcentury after-the-A-bomb flick, racing the vacant city with the whole world to themselves but nothing remaining in it.
Visually and sonically, we’re surrounded by the ghosts of movies that didn’t come true, tunnel lights streaking across the windshield like the phantoms of sleek ’60s cinema about swinging modern Europeans in their sportscars; the high-pitched floating chorus straight out of some Morricone score, with icy organ chords out of a B-thriller and serpentine flute from some forgotten exotic travelogue. These hover over the ominous horns’ dirge, the groove’s loping menace, and the funereal base vocals like a disembodied soundtrack, a mass evacuation of disquieted souls, the evaporation of an optimistic dream.
Out in real life, those empty streets would be filling with rioters across England the year the song came out, in areas of mass unemployment ignited by racist policing, and this integrated band’s unexpected hit became the unintended background music for a season of discontent. But while “Ghost Town” was a mournful memorial to a gathering silence, its accidental audience was shouting back with signs of life.
SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Lucy Sante on Margarita’s WOMAN COME | Douglas Wolk on Millie’s MAYFAIR | Lynn Peril on Prince Buster’s TEN COMMANDMENTS | Mark Kingwell on The [English] Beat’s TEARS OF A CLOWN | Annie Nocenti on Jimmy Cliff’s MISS JAMAICA | Mariane Cara on The Selecter’s ON MY RADIO | Adam McGovern on The Specials’ GHOST TOWN | Josh Glenn on The Ethiopians’ TRAIN TO SKAVILLE | Susannah Breslin on The [English] Beat’s MIRROR IN THE BATHROOM | Carl Wilson on Prince Buster / Madness’s ONE STEP BEYOND | Carlo Rotella on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ THE IMPRESSION THAT I GET | Rani Som on The Bodysnatchers’ EASY LIFE | David Cantwell on Desmond Dekker’s 007 (SHANTY TOWN) | Annie Zaleski on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ SOME DAY I SUPPOSE | Mimi Lipson on Folkes Brothers’ / Count Ossie’s OH CAROLINA | Alix Lambert on The Specials’ TOO MUCH TOO YOUNG | Marc Weidenbaum on Dandy Livingstone’s RUDY, A MESSAGE TO YOU | Heather Quinlan on Fishbone’s MA & PA | Will Hermes on The [English] Beat’s WHINE & GRINE / STAND DOWN MARGARET | Peter Doyle on The Skatalites’ GUNS OF NAVARONE | James Parker on The [English] Beat’s SAVE IT FOR LATER | Brian Berger on The Upsetters’ RETURN OF DJANGO | Francesca Royster on Joya Landis’ ANGEL OF THE MORNING | Deborah Wassertzug on The Bodysnatchers’ TOO EXPERIENCED | Dan Reines on The Untouchables’ I SPY FOR THE FBI.
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